New Matchmaking and Glory Observations

We had seen several questions pop up about the new matchmaking and observation of Glory values feeling 'off' or different. Here is a central thread we can use to discuss some of these changes.

Matchmaking and Glory

The goal for matchmaking is the same as it's been: to pair Alliances in fair matches without excessive wait times. I agree, this has been tumultuous in the past couple of weeks, with a server outage, matchmaking Wars by hand, and now introducing new matchmaking formulas with notice - but little detail and some questions to the state of Glory.

1.) Starting with the new matchmaking this week, we have seen Alliances of all sizes find matches. The new matchmaking system should be working to avoid disparately unbalanced matches.

2.) The Glory issue is believed to be related to a change to the Glory formula that was implemented months ago. With a new way matches are being made, that may be affecting the Glory available. There are two things to be aware of: the first is that this is affecting all Alliances the same way., and that we have the ability to roll these old changes back. We will be watching this weekend's wars closely and would make any adjustments after that. As always, you can let me or Nb4powerup know how your Alliance is doing!

3.) A lot of the egregious wait times came in the past week, where several Wars were being made manually. Current reports have median matchmaking time take less than 10 minutes. Again, this is something we will have eyes on.

Some Alliances are just getting into their 2nd matches utilizing these new matchmaking rules. We would encourage you to look at your matches closely, keeping in mind that things are tweaked differently now.

I know that many of you would like a little more concrete information on how matchmaking is done. I can say that there are multiple filters that are being applied to finding the matches now. Ultimately, more details may be best left to a future State of the Nations - after, of course, all of the matchmaking changes have settled out and we have some more data back.

Thank you so much for your patience and understanding. We are looking forward to hearing about your Wars this weekend!

the new changes seems better to me, however I don't know why my post about smurfs got deleted, this issue is so bad, making a new alliance to take down top alliances and high ranked ones and cause much glory loss to them or very little glory gain compared to effort is very frustrating

top alliances players are making new alliances (which start at very low glory score) and get matched with weaker alliances (with high glory score) causing the mentioned above problem

i know the more filters applied the more difficult match making becomes, maybe it can be solved in another way such as making the new alliance perks more impactful on war bonuses so new alliances made by these players become significantly weaker in offensive and defensive stats in war, please pass this to devs responsible about war system

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I couldn't agree more. We are matched up with a sandbagging cheater group Cerberus. We have faced many of these members before and they always sandbag and cheat and Nexon does nothing. They have 12 atomics to our 4, we can gain 6 glory and lose 1381. Yet we have zero chance. It's a complete joke.

Our latest match was made 2 hours ago, well after the "Matchmaking and glory" post was made.

Earlier this week, we got an extremely unbalanced match, impossible to win. The one you gave us this time was even worse.

We are fielding 3 industrials, 11 enlightenment, 5 gunpowder and 1 medieval. Our top player is ranked 144. The other industrials are a 124 and a 110. The opposition has 6 global, 7 industrial, 3 enlightenment, 2 gunpowder and 2 medieval. The globals are not rushed. There is a 190, a 180, etc. The industrials include a 178 and a 176. There is no rational algorithm that would match this alliance against us,

We are boycotting this war -- we won't fight any battles or put troops in any TC's or strongholds. We are not going to start any new wars until you make a fix to this that works, and other players confirm that it works.

Please learn how to test your software. This kind of matchmaking error is blatant and should have been obvious in even a modest playtesting effort. Inflicting one round of bad matchmaking on us is sad, but inflicting a "fix" to your "fix" that makes it even worse is just unacceptable.

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Yesterday we finished our lastest war, which - according to the information shared in the game - should have been started with the new matchmaking functionality already.

> The new matchmaking system should be working to avoid disparately unbalanced matches.
It was never as bad as this time. We did not have the slightest chance to win that war. I have added a few screenshots for documentation.

> With a new way matches are being made, that may be affecting the Glory available.
Yes, it seems that the glory was somehow affected by the changes being made. In the past, when the had wars against far stronger alliances we would have won 400-500 glory and only lost 50-100.
For this last war against the very strong alliances we would have won incredible 18 glory. But since we lost, we lost > 500 glory ...

I am sorry to say:
This is no fun. It is useless to spent resources and time on such wars. Furthermore it is ridiculous to lose so much glory in - like you call it "disparately unbalanced matches".
I like to add: Your basic idea to improve matchmaking is good. Please simply do it as described in your post.

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Thanks for post. We also notice sharp glory reduction during last 2 wwar. Total glory 100-200. We won 45/ lose 55, feel it does not really motivated to wwar bcos of this small amount. Reg alliance balance, for those who complain, better take picture of yr top 5 vs opponent top 5. It's not strange to see IA more advance than GA (just bcos you dont want to advance age and it's not fault of the system) & XP lvl is also meaningless (up yr road max to yr age and yr XP lvl wl be same as opponent)

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We just set up our third war since your matchmaking "improvement". Our top player is a level 162. Ten of 25 of the opposition are 162 or higher.
They have 1 atomic, we have none
They have 5 global, we have 1
They have 8 industrial, we have 5.
They have 5 enlightenment, we have 13. They have 2 each of gunpowder, medieval and classical. We have 5 gunpowder and 1 medieval.

This is our third war in a row that is not remotely winnable.

This is not a problem of sandbagging. It is an algorithmic problem -- there is no reasonable criterion under which this could look like a remotely fair match.

Fighting wars that are obviously unwinnable from the start is no fun. Please acknowledge your bug and fix it.

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If they're not going fix the match making, why can't they add an a simple option on the war search screen for alliance leaders to prioritize a fast matchup or an even matchup? The fast matchup would be as it is now and the tolerance would increase with how long the search takes. An even matchup would have a much narrower fixed tolerance. Let people choose.